Hoax

I just finished, finally after many five-minute snatches during office hours, Alyce Miller’s “Real Fakes and Inauthentic Others” in the March/April Writer’s Chronicle. The essay introduces a list early on of “patterns inherent in hoaxes” like “spacial/temporal distance” and aesthetic/experiential distance.” Though these terms seem useful, they don’t resurface later in the essay at any significant level. Instead the essay serves as a tour through (fairly) recent literary hoaxes. For some reason, and aggravatingly, the essay refers throughout to the New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani as Kukatani. This is not a quibble; throughout, the essay approaches otherness as part of the problem with hoaxes.
        The essay covers so many hoaxes—Margaret Jones, Asa Carter, Helen Demidenko, Alan Sokal, Rigoberta Menchú, Ern Malley, Araki Yasusada, that it serves as a good prospectus of hoaxes, but it isn’t able to offer much thinking on the consequences and workings of hoaxes.
        Still, one point comes through in Miller’s account, and that is that people like hoaxes (before they know they are hoaxes) because, as she says of Alex Haley’s Roots, they are “so full of ‘truths.’” Well. True enough, despite the dangers of this sort of scare-quoted truth. (Yellowcake? Gulf of Tonkin incident?) So books like Roots, though heavily plagiarized, or, as Miller puts it, “indebted to sources (Haley) hadn’t credited,” still tell us something of a necessary truth.
        Fine. So why not call them fiction? This is a point that Miller doesn’t address (Questions for authenticity a blind spot in the Writer’s Chronicle? Never!), and it is very worth of addressing because, to me anyway, it cuts to the heart of the matter. We want it to be true, so bad we’ll accept “true.” Like the Bush administration, we want so badly for something to be true—like, for example, that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks—that we’ll believe what it takes for it to be true. Colbert’s “truthiness” says it well.
        It also, to me, gets to another important point: the imagination is feminized. Imaginative works aren’t taken to be worth as much as the “truth,” much less the truth. Fiction is lies and therefore can’t be as true as lies. Works of art are alien, unwanted, threatening because they come to us without the cloak of necessary information. They put the onus all on us. If we like a fiction, it is because we choose to do so. The “truth” of Haley’s narrative is thrust upon us willy nilly.
        A “true” story sells.
        But then again we pick and choose when it comes to hoaxes or plagiarism . Doris Kearns Goodwin is a perennial PBS talking head, even though she’s been caught copying. Meanhile, Ward Churchill, who is and is not a Native American, is and is not a PhD, is being kicked out of his professorship for plagiarizing and falsifying sources. That is, hoaxing.
        I guess the difference here is that Haley and Churchill are playing with identity politics. But isn’t Goodwin playing at being someone she’s not when she borrows so liberally? And she’s not alone. So Goodwin and Churchill are interesting limit cases. One helps solidify the national mythos while the other says what no one wants to hear, or at least what very few people want to hear.

Miller’s essay ends with a grab-bag of Sunday-supplment truisms: “Hoaxes challenge moral, aesthetic, and ethical presumptions; they turn upside down what we hold sacrosanct. They infuriate and defy us. Moreover they critique us. Perhaps, paradoxically, hoaxes will help keep us honest.” I want to take a page from Godelier’s critique of Mauss and point out that, as he says of Mauss’s gifts, hoaxes have no agency of their own.
        As I write, a president of a southern university, is defending himself more or less successfully against charges of plagiarism; a professor at Columbia has been fired for plagiarizing, after (she claims and the U sort of denies, waffles about) racial harassment, which may be related to students’ claims that she stole their work.
        How we handle our hoaxers reveals what we value.
        I worked at book store when The Bell Curve was hot. This was in an upmarket book store in Memphis. Folks in east Memphis and Germantown couldn’t get enough of The Bell Curve. At the same time, the private schools educating these peoples’ children were assigning The Education of Little Tree, along with The Giver and all the typical young adult reading. In these schoools, did they talk about the problems of Carter’s book? The dishonest and problematic authorship? The image it sold and which in turn sold it? Would its readers understand the anger of a man like Ward Churchill? Excuse the fakery of a woman like Menchu, of Haley’s story?

I’m writing this in Knoxville, alongside the Tennessee river, not too far from where the Tellico dam, which was and was not necessary, is and is not useful, sank (without question) the Cherokee village of Tanasi.

Update: Some coverage from Slate on Goodwin being defended by other historians, including Sean Wilentz.

Another update: Errol Morris weighs in on the van Meegeren forgeries in a series of blog entries, “Bamboozling Ourselves (Part 1).” I recommend The Forger’s Spell and, on a related note, the film Who the Fuck is Jackson Pollock.

Yet another update: Michael Leddy over on Orange Crate Art takes up the issue of “What Plagiarism Looks Like,” as it relates to the largely-plagiarized dissertation of the president of Jacksonville State University. This reminds me of my earlier blog entry on the diploma mill degrees the Tennessee Board of Regents said were “jes fine” (apologies to Walt Kelly). As Leddy observes, the penalties for plagiarism diminish as one’s power increases.